Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas

Lauren Rule Maxwell

Description

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels—Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock—that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates them into an American context. Kincaid relies on the repeated image of the daffodil, Atwood displaces Lucy, McCarthy upends the American arcadia, Fitzgerald heaps Keatsian images of excess, and Harris transforms the albatross. In her close readings, Maxwell suggests that the novels reframe Romantic poetry to allegorically confront empire, revealing how subjectivity is shaped by considerations of place and power. Returning to British Romantic poetry allows the novels to extend the Romantic poetics of landscape that traditionally considered the British subject's relation to place. By recasting Romantic poetics in the Americas, these novels show how negotiations of identity and power are defined by the legacies of British imperialism, illustrating that these nations, their peoples, and their works of art are truly postcolonial. While many postcolonial scholars and critics have dismissed the idea that Romantic poetry can be used to critique colonialism, Maxwell suggests that, on the contrary, it has provided contemporary writers across the Americas with a means of charting the literary and cultural legacies of British imperialism in the New World. The poems of the British Romantics offer postcolonial writers particularly rich material, Maxwell argues, because they characterize British influence at the height of the British empire. In explaining how the novels adapt figures from British Romantic poetry, Romantic Revisions provides scholars and students working in postcolonial studies, Romanticism, and English-language literature with a new look at politics of location in the Americas.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: Wordsworthian Intertexts in Kincaid's Lucy

Chapter Two: Specters of US Empire in Atwood's Fiction

Chapter Three: McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Byron, and the US Frontier

Chapter Four: Keatsian Echoes and US Materialism in The Great Gatsby

Chapter Five: The Coleridgean Poetics of Palace of the Peacock

Conclusion: British Legacy in the Americas

Epilogue: Angels in America Guard and Guide

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literary theory
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612492629
• Langue: English

Extrait

Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas
Comparative Cultural Studies Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, Series Editor
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Volumes in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies include http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/series/comparative-cultural-studies
Lauren Rule Maxwell, Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas
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Sheng-mei Ma, Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity
Irene Marques, Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity
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Yi Zheng, From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
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Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas
Lauren Rule Maxwell
Purdue University Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2013 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maxwell, Lauren Rule.
Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas / by Lauren Rule Maxwell.
p. cm. -- (Comparative cultural studies; 30)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-641-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-261-2 (epdf)
-- ISBN 978-1-61249-262-9 (epub) 1. American fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Romanticism--Influence. I. Title.
PS379.M317 2013
813 .509--dc23
2012039049
For MJ, my faithful reader, and in loving memory of my dad, who taught me so much
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One
Wordsworthian Intertexts in Kincaid s Lucy
Chapter Two
Specters of US Empire in Atwood s Fiction
Chapter Three
McCarthy s Blood Meridian , Byron, and the US Frontier
Chapter Four
Keatsian Echoes and US Materialism in The Great Gatsby
Chapter Five
The Coleridgean Poetics of Palace of the Peacock
Conclusion
British Legacy in the Americas
Epilogue
Angels in America Guard and Guide
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
While writing this book, I have been inspired by and supported by many people. I would like to thank those who challenged and guided me as I began developing this project: Deborah Elise White, Deepika Bahri, Walter Kalaidjian, Mark McWatt, and Martine Watson Brownley. I am especially indebted to my mentor and advisor, Martine Watson Brownley, who has given so much to me and to this project. I am a better scholar, a better writer, and a better teacher because she took me under her wing. I would also like to thank all of the fellows and staff members at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Emory University Department of English faculty and staff members, those who assisted me at the Robert W. Woodruff Library and the Daniel Library, and the graduate students who helped me make my work better. My colleagues in the English Department at The Citadel deserve many thanks for providing me with advice and encouragement as I made final revisions. I also thank the editor of the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, for making this book a reality. Last but not least, my family and friends have been incredibly supportive of this project; I thank them for their enthusiasm and love.
I also want to thank the departments, centers, and societies that have supported my research: the Emory University Department of English, the Emory Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Emory Department of Women s Studies, the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the Hemingway Society, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the Margaret Atwood Society, and The Citadel Foundation.
Parts of chapter 2 and chapter 4 were published in different forms in the journals Modern Fiction Studies and The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review , respectively. I am grateful to the editors of both of them for the permission to reprint those essays here.
Introduction
This study developed from my desire to understand why twentieth-century American novels display a preoccupation with British Romantic poetry and its legacy. In my examination of a diverse group of such novels from former British colonies across the Americas, I have found that each work has crucial scenes that invoke Romantic poetry for a sociopolitical critique of burgeoning US empire. Romantic Revisions traces a transatlantic circulation of Romantic poetics, suggesting that its conceptualization of landscape allows authors to negotiate imperial politics of location by investigating the relationship between a subject s place and his or her position of power. Many postcolonial critics have dismissed Romantic poetry as a mode of resistance, but this study suggests that, on the contrary, it has provided contemporary writers with a means of more clearly charting the literary and cultural legacies of British imperialism in the New World.
In Romantic Revisions I examine five twentieth-century novels from former British colonies across the Americas and consider why these novels demonstrate a significant engagement with British Romantic poetry. These novels are Jamaica Kincaid s Lucy (1990), Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale (1985), Cormac McCarthy s Blood Meridian (1985), F. Scott Fitzgerald s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Wilson Harris s Palace of the Peacock (1960)-novels written by a diverse range of novelists in very different geographical, historical, and social contexts. Nevertheless, these novels all return to Romantic poetry as they grapple with the legacy of British colonialism within their respective American frames of reference. Although these novels are set in a variety of locations and timeframes, they all share a preoccupation with British colonial influence that becomes manifest in their Romantic intertexts. As Ian Smith has argued, literature . . . particularly by way of intertextuality, creates opportunities for the de-scribing of empire, [for] the . . . dismantling [of] colonial regimes of power in language (803). I argue that novelists from different locations in the Americas participate in this project by using intertexts with British Romantic poetry to critique and highlight the ways in which British imperialism has taken root in the American colonies. The term de-scribing not only represents the act of conveying to a reader what empire is like in terms that describe it, but also focuses on the use of language itself to draw attention to the ways that literature, in this case Romantic poetry, has served to inscribe colonial subjects within their proper places in imperial landscapes. In a sense, the de-scription process aims to undo this inscription by bringing the impression these texts make on colonial societies into greater relief.
In De-